3DOM2

Open source

I built 3DOM2 as a tool to explore who owns and controls the publications I read. It began with a running joke in my family about Polska Press being owned by an oil company. I went looking for more examples of this corruption, but this research became gradually less funny as I realized just how much work goes into tracing organization ownership. I did some digging into a tool that does this automatically, but found that one did not exist.

I built a tool that allows someone to enter a publication and explore an automatically researched ownership map. It follows parent organizations through several levels and lets the reader click individual connections to inspect the relevant source links. I recently extended the scope of this to include academic journals, because I was interested to see just how far corruption goes in the realm of the written word (George Orwell has a lot to say on this, interestingly enough, in “Can Socialists Be Happy?”). I started with a small HTML, CSS, and JavaScript page that loaded a Polska Press data file with a single connection. That grew into an interactive SVG graph with pan and zoom, saved maps, JSON exports, etc. Behind the maps is a Node.js research service that uses public sources, proposes a graph, and validates that graph before it's drawn out by the reader.

One of my biggest lessons working on this was that ownership is an onion. There are SO many layers to the question of who owns something. A company can publish a journal, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have majority ownership. A completely different organization can have “appointment rights,” and have a lot of power over who gets put in charge while not necessarily being in charge themselves. And a lot of times a chain ends in a bunch of dispersed shareholders rather than a single person. I definitely learned a lot about how to tell when ownership is likely to be problematic based on how intentionally dispersed the maps look. I'm continuously updating the categories of ownership to account for all the different ways media sources are controlled through ownership.

In terms of traction I want to keep this an open-source project and be open to whoever wants to duplicate it and build onto it for their own purposes. I'd also like to integrate a version of it into Captain for journalists to reference when choosing their sources, should they wish to.